


Shiva

by somedumbindiething



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Gen, Grief, Judaism, Mourning, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-28
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-21 14:09:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/901187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somedumbindiething/pseuds/somedumbindiething
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joseph Liebgott, the one Jewish man of the Company, must relearn how to mourn strangers, his brothers, those who passed without his knowing, those for whom he could not sit shiva</p><p>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereavement_in_Judaism)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shiva

Swearing exhaustion, Joe Liebgott had been fading in and out of sleep for what felt like days.

Joe had pulled away early from the rest of the men playing cards and drinking, and holed up in the makeshift bedroom of the OP they had cannibalized from a German house. The bed was stripped of sheets but he was still tangled up there, lying on what were, admittedly, mere wooden boards, sweat shining on exposed skin like new blood. The night was warm, warmer than any that had preceded it. It was unnerving. _Fuck_ – half aloud – was he honestly missing the cold? The way wind snuck under doors, under blankets, under clothes, right into his lungs. For weeks he would wake half-sure he had died in his sleep, suffocated by frost. He’d wake and for a brief moment he would know what it felt to be a dead man; the stiff tarp around him became the _tallit_ he’d be buried in, the foxhole the flimsy box of his coffin, thin enough that worms could get to him before his memory had been thawed.  
Decomposing, he imagined his skull bleeding back into earth the way sand falls into water, and worms, white like corpses, pulled the past few years – Toccoa, Aldbourne, Normandy, Holland, Bastogne, Hagenau – apart bit by bit. He saw himself being eaten.

He would be buried, he knew, in white linen; the _tallit_ ’s silk fringes would yellow over time until only they and his fillings remained. He would be buried, he knew, on a weekday. He would have his head covered and marked by a squat grave that would be lined with rocks, some picked up from the road outside, some smoothed by sea and sand, some bumpy and brittle from driveways and curbs in the city.

Joe thought of who would sit by his body. _Shomer,_ soul-guard, sentry, watcher, as his corpse grew bone-white with the dull veneer of gun metal until the rest of him was collected.

The practice had somehow always held a peculiar fascination for him. As a child, Joe remembered his father spending a full night away at the hospital, enduring glares and scowls as he sat by the hospital bed of Joe’s uncle with his cigarette writing _Tehillim_ in smoke. When Joe’s father returned home, he was shaken and unshaved. He covered the mirrors and cut his tie with a breadknife before sitting on the floor like he had been struck. For seven days – _shiva_ – people streamed in and out of his family tiny home, shaking hands or sitting in chairs beside Joe’s father’s perch on the floor. Joe’s mother had taken out the cutlery that Joe had never seen before – silver like the kind that Captain Speirs slipped into his pockets – and the taste of silver polish was in his mouth for days.   
(He could still taste it now, but he wasn’t sure if it was just an association or a true gut reaction, that death stirred in him something bitter and heavy and inorganic).  
It was almost meditative, this week-long removal from life. Joe had seen this as heroic then, quiet stoicism that steeled him against the emptiness that was spreading so fast from his father’s fingers, wrists, chest. Now he wasn’t so sure; what had been pious to Joe as a child was almost passive to Joe now. A whimper rather than a shout.

Light cracked in through the windows, but whether it could qualify as morning or not would be decided later. Relieved to have an excuse to move, Joe pulled himself up, dizzy but stable, and tugged at his sweat-soaked uniform. Stepping softly, he managed to make his way to the door and stumbled outside, welcoming the chance to stretch off his sleeplessness.

“You were out for a while.”

Joe turned. Of course.

“Web,” he muttered, halfway between a greeting and a dismissal. It was a shrug of a salutation, and Webster seemed to recognize it as such, looking down and frowning. Taking pity, Joe faked a smile. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said.

Webster jogged to close the gap between them, and the two walked side by side down the hallway from the bedrooms to the stairs, boots gasping on old wood floorboards. “I’d imagine not,” he said, aiming for humour.

Joe ran a hand through his hair, made unruly by sweat and stasis. “I’ve been better.”

Webster held the door open for them to walk through. “I understand,” which was a lie, but a welcome one. It had been almost a week since they’d uncovered the Landsberg camp, strolled into hell, but Webster was no closer to understanding. He’d settled on observing – Joe’s careful steps, the heaviness of his eyelids, the drooping of his mouth, the fear that seemed to leak out of him like a slow-coming storm. Webster studied his unshaven face, his ripped uniform, his abstinence from card games or singing (even those dirty songs that Luz liked so much, even the ones that sounded like German but weren’t), his sudden sobriety. He could write worlds of the way Joe’s voice rose and fell, the way he stared blankly at his nails and chewed the inside of his cheek, the way he rolled his lit cigarette between nervous fingers, the silence that stretched from, through, beyond him.

Joe wrinkled onto the floor by the stairs. Webster sat in a chair beside him, feeling more a shadow than a ghost. The sun was still a sliver of light, sending lines of orange and grey trailing through the deep blue night that was refusing to retreat. Joe sighed, turning the air between them sour with the smell of silver polish. “I can’t get it out of my head, Web.”

Webster nodded. This was the moment where he was supposed to say something, but he sensed that Joe wasn’t finished.

“I can do nothing.”

“I know,” said Webster. He wanted to put a hand on Joe’s shoulder, his arm, his leg, something; Joe seemed so far away and somehow small, like a child or a bird.

“I couldn’t change anything.”

“I know.”

“We didn’t get there in time.”

Silence.

“We didn’t do enough.”

Webster ran his tongue over his teeth but said nothing. Joe looked up at him, his eyes not so much sad but tired, drained. He looked empty.

“I know.”

Joe blinked away the sleep from his lids. He rubbed the heel of his hand over his stubble – he hadn’t shaved for almost a week. “Why couldn’t we do anything, Web?”

The question took Webster by surprise. He inhaled then stopped, holding the air in his mouth for what felt like too long before allowing it to escape again. Joe looked so strange this way, almost broken. Wordlessly, Webster slid out of the chair and took a spot on the floor beside Joe, leaning straight-backed against the wall. He put an arm around Joe’s shoulders and was relieved to feel the dull weight of his friend’s head on the crook of his arm and neck.

“I know,” he said, which was a lie, but a welcome one. Joe repeated it back to him, nearly a whisper, nearly not-said, a nothing “I know”; “I know, I know, I know.”

Joe reached for Webster’s hand, held it, pushed his thumb onto his wrist. _Shomer_ , he thought. Watcher. Keeper.

“You can’t mourn them all,” Webster said, immediately feeling stupid. Childish. Frail. Innocent, or, worse, insignificant. A know-nothing.

Joe could feel his coffin crumbling into the earth.

“I know,” he muttered, his breath a ghost in the air.

**Author's Note:**

> for Team Currahee v2, in the HBOwarathonv2 - no monetary gain, based on actors' portrayal, etc etc etc  
> I'd been struggling with a lot of Liebgott fanfiction because I felt a lot of it tended to underwrite or misrepresent his Judaism and his Jewish roots. This piece was an attempt to bridge the gap between a canonically Jewish character and the real Jewish practices of grieving and bereavement, to draw from my own experiences as a Jewish person to offer a different look at Liebgott and his emotions after the events of Why We Fight.


End file.
